Last year, Art Cullen, the editor of The Storm Lake Times, a twice-weekly newspaper in rural Iowa with a circulation of 3,000, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Cullen, who has a mop of white hair and a horseshoe mustache, had written a series of blistering editorials about the role agricultural corporations played in defending the pollution of local waterways. Cullen so angered some state legislators that a resolution simply congratulating Cullen and his colleagues couldn’t garner enough votes. The Republican state senator Mark Segebart told The Des Moines Register that Cullen “is not one of our favorite newspapermen.”

It’s not easy being a journalist these days, but it’s especially not easy if you’re working at a local newspaper. According to the Pew Research Center, daily newspaper circulation declined 11 percent from 2016 to 2017; the number of reporters and editors has plummeted by 45 percent since 2004. Amid these dark clouds, Storm Lake’s winning the Pulitzer feels reassuring, a reminder that even the smallest newspapers — Storm Lake is a family affair, involving Cullen’s brother (the publisher), his wife (a photographer) and his son (a reporter) — can hold the most powerful among us accountable. Cullen is a crusader in the spirit of Elijah Lovejoy, a 19th-century small-town newspaper publisher whose editorials took on the institution of slavery. As Cullen writes in his new book, “Storm Lake,” when he and his brother John began to publish their newspaper, they had one thing in mind: “Print the truth and raise hell.”

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Art Cullen, right, with his brother John in the newsroom of The Storm Lake Times.CreditMark Brown/University of St. Thomas

In the wake of being awarded journalism’s highest honor, Cullen received phone calls from New York publishers asking if he’d be interested in writing a book. He eventually agreed. The book begins as a history of Cullen’s and his brother’s journalistic journey, including their purchase of The Storm Lake Times in 1990, and the story behind their Pulitzer-winning editorials. Because of changes in farming, nitrates were being dumped into local waterways at an alarming rate, the pollution ending up downstream, in places like Des Moines. When the Des Moines Water Works sued three counties, including the one that is home to Cullen’s paper, the local governments quickly amassed a large war chest for their legal defense. Through dogged reporting, The Storm Lake Times learned that much of the money came from corporate agricultural interests along with state farmer associations; as a result of the editorials, the counties stopped taking the money.

This book, though, feels rushed. Too much of “Storm Lake” consists of broadsides, suppositional reporting and thinly drawn character sketches. Cullen has an unfortunate tendency toward armchair editorializing rather than grounded reporting. At one point, he asks, “If you’re a white male living in Storm Lake, what gives with the angry routine?” A few pages later, he walks into a bar and grill in nearby Rockwell City. “I rolled through the door and got the hairy eyeball from a guy my age in a crew cut and T-shirt,” he writes. He then goes on to imagine what this gentleman must be thinking: “He thinks people have been looking down at him since junior high school.” Cullen imagines that the man worries his taxes will go up because of the influx of immigrants; that black men could be going to college tuition-free but riot in the streets instead; and that his future is slipping away. “I could attempt to understand him,” Cullen muses. “Or I could just eat my cheeseburger.” He chooses the cheeseburger. I wanted to shout: You’re a journalist! Talk to him!

I share Cullen’s disdain for the odious Steve King, the Iowa congressman whose history of promoting white nationalist views recently drew a rebuke from the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and who happens to hail from Storm Lake, which has a population of 10,000. Yet when Cullen encounters King at a political gathering, he misses the chance to ask hard questions, writing, “I approached King after he locked up the convention and asked for a happy quote.” I’ve been a journalist for 40 years and have never heard of a reporter making such a request. I’m not even sure what a “happy quote” is.

While Cullen’s writing is impassioned, a plea for the rest of us not to dismiss places like Storm Lake, the prose too often feels careless and imprecise. At one point he writes of the children born to immigrants in town: “They are babies born to people who weren’t babies born here themselves.” Such foggy prose doesn’t serve Cullen well.

I don’t mean to sound cranky, but this book feels like a missed opportunity. Cullen and his brother are heroic figures, especially at a time when local journalism stands on such wobbly legs. Moreover, they live in a place that speaks to the dramatic changes in this country: Immigrants have settled in Storm Lake to take low-paying jobs at the local meatpacking plants (Cullen vigorously defends their right to be there), and white men and women who are rabid Trump supporters seem to vote against their own interests. The mayor of a nearby town refuses to speak to the paper because, he claims, it publishes “fake news.” I wanted to cherish this book, to feel I could pass it on to young aspiring reporters, to get them to consider working at papers like The Storm Lake Times.

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Toward the very end, Cullen reprints a letter he wrote to his son Tom when Tom returns home after college to work at the newspaper. It’s a beautiful missive, inspirational and honest and pointed. Is it worth the price of admission? I’m not sure. But it’s something I will give to my students as they consider entering this honorable, yet beleaguered, profession. Here’s a taste of Art Cullen at his best:

“Dear Tom,

“We are delighted that you have agreed to work at Buena Vista County’s Hometown Newspaper. …

“The newspaper always comes first. If you are on your honeymoon … of course you tell your bride to wait a moment while you take photos of a fire. The marriage will be there in a half-hour; the fire will not be.…

“A pretty good rule is that an Iowa town will be about as strong as its newspaper and its banks. The best journalism is that which builds communities. You build your community by publicizing good deeds done, by reporting on the cheats and scoundrels and other politicians, by urging yourself and those around you to do better, by allowing dissenting voices to be heard.…

“Above all, rejoice that you write for a living. … You can change the world through journalism. …

“Love (you had better check it out),

“Dad

“PS: Is that story done yet?”

Alex Kotlowitz teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and is the author of four books, including the forthcoming “An American Summer.”